one new message
by broken halleluiah
Summary: She told him never to call when he was drunk.


**I wrote this about a year ago, when Futurama was the air I breathed. I post it now at the request of the Sophisticated Shut In. Huzzah!**

 **T for alcohol usage, mild language, and Bender.**

* * *

At the PTA meetings, his teachers always told her not to compare her children, but when the family finally broke down and had the memorial service, Mrs. Fry had to think of something to say that could differentiate him from Yancy. He hadn't accomplished much, after all.

He wasn't the smart kid, the successful kid, the athletic one, anything, but the one thing she could always say was that Phillip _wasn't_ the problem child. He was easy to keep track of. She could usually find him in one of three places: upside-down in front of the television, crouched inside the refrigerator, or with one eye melded to his telescope lens. He wasn't skateboarding off rooftops or smoking things, as long as she could keep him away from Yancy's dares, and he was responsible for only a handful of her gray hair, all of which had sprung up from a single heart attack he induced years ago.

Phillip disappeared after dinner on New Year's Eve. The last thing she remembered saying to him was that he needed to take the trash out, _lazy_ , but she had all of her senses glued to the big game and couldn't spare one to see if the message had made it all the way to him or been stopped short by the slamming back door. He didn't come back for dessert, which was fine, more for them. He wasn't back by ten o'clock when she went to bed, but who cared, it wasn't a school night. She left the back door unlocked and the porch light on.

The call came at exactly 4:18 A.M. and startled her out of a most lovely dream about the Giants' latest victory. A light flashed on the answering machine- _one new message_ \- and when she played it, that's when her heart hiccupped.

It was her younger son's voice, that was certain, but garbled and gruff and unmistakably drunk. He was crying. She had to play it twice more before she could make out a single word of the message. _I'm so sorry... I'm not coming back…_

She swatted her husband's face, and he reeled out of bed wailing about the Commies. They called the police and the fire department and he got out his assault rifle and fired into the night sky and hollered for him to _come home now, boy, before I whup you twice as hard_. The gray morning hours were a blur of sirens and the flashing lights of patrol cars and the blinking of the answering machine. She couldn't call back, the number wasn't valid.

When Yancy triumphantly (and literally) dragged Phillip over the doorstep six hours later, painfully confused and hung-over, he tried to deny everything- he hadn't run away, he hadn't left a message, and hisss wordses weren't slurrrrred, dangit. She smacked him across the face.

"I don't care how old you get to be, or what kind of trouble you get in," she told her fifteen-year-old son lividly. "I never want to get another message like that again. You don't call your mother in the middle of the night drunk, got it?"

"I swear, I was just taking a nap."

He threw up on her shoes.

* * *

At the memorial service, she said that he had never gotten in trouble, not even once, and Yancy nodded.

* * *

Bender had always had a love of the sciences encoded intohim, particularly a branch that he would come to call _alcohology_. Sure, it was a delicious and wonderfully effective fuel for robot, but its effect on human beings provided for so many more scientifically fascinating experiments. Particularly in large quantities. Particularly when tested upon Fry. It was worth sacrificing a bit of booze for repeated experimentation, although the nightly drinking competitions only tricked Fry for the first couple of weeks before he realized Bender couldn't lose. (Because fool him twelve times, shame on Bender, but _thirteen_ …)

After that, the game became a little more complex, and it often involved slipping a shot or two into his coffee mug when he planned to stay up all night and beat the last thirty-seven levels of Galactic Invaders.

The scientifically educational viral videos that these incidents provided were almost infinite. Fry danced on the balcony in his underwear; he threw up into his shoes and tried to wash them in the dish washer; he phoned Leela at ungodly hours and asked for her hand in Holy Macaroni. Then they'd put on their capes and go to great heroic lengths- namely, breaking and entering- to erase the incriminating messages from Leela's answering machine. The day she'd accidentally shot Fry in the arm in her darkened apartment had won him ten thousand big boys on Earth's Funniest Home Tragedies.

But then there were the boring nights that Fry got plastered entirely on his own and laid in the dark and stared at the ceiling and sometimes blasted the ancient music of his people. He would mourn his gene donors or that fossilized dog or one of those other dead things he felt such undying affection toward. Bender called Leela, who told him that the condition was called _grief_ and he didn't need to medicate Fry or otherwise put him out of his misery. It would go away on its own.

Bender huffed. "Well, what do I do in the meantime? He's driving me screwy."

"I don't know. Turn the TV up," she snapped.

She said not to call again; there'd been a break-in at the Planet Express, a doomsday device was missing, blah blah blah, the usual universe-being-endangered stuff.

"I _can't sleep._ I hate the sh-tupid future. I'm sick of this." Fry stormed out of the kitchen holding a TV dinner, a sad lack of sobriety in his eyes and pants on his lower half. "All the sh-tupid shrink-wrap… and all I want are _just some noodles_."

Without ever turning from the television, Bender listened to him struggle with the packaging for another moment before slamming it into the wall and drop-kicking it. "I forgot how to make the oven get hot," Fry said obnoxiously, scooping the phone off the coffee table and punching buttons with shaking fingers. "How do you make Ramen noodles on the sh-tove?"

"You give up and use the microwave."

A busy signal sounded in Fry's ear and he cursed, immediately dialing again. "I can't get to the microwave because there's _battery acid_ all over the floor. Also I broke it. Also your dead cat's still inside."

Another busy signal. "She never picks up!" Fry exploded, biting his lip against frustrated tears.

"Tell Leela's answering machine 'hi' for me. And that I'll see her on Friday," Bender said suggestively. "Wait, I thought Leela blocked your number?"

 _We're sorry, your call could not be completed as dialed._

Fry slid down the wall to the floor with the phone to his ear. "Hey, it's me. It's Phillip," he said, in a surprising steady voice for someone who was shaking so hard. "I can't remember how- what temperature to cook Ramen noodles- I know it's been a while and I- I missed your birthday, but- if you could call me back, Mom-"

He choked on the final _I love you_ , which grated on Bender so much that he couldn't help but wrench himself from the drama of _All My Circuits_ momentarily to glare at Fry.

"I don't know if you've got all your marbles right now, meatbag, but you've got to connect to the big answering machine in the sky for that."

The human's stupid meat face crumpled against his meat knees. "Don't you think I _know_ that?" he wailed.

Fry sobbed harder than Calculon, who had just been diagnosed with incurable rust, and damn it, the TV wouldn't turn up any louder.

* * *

When Fry was fifteen he went star-gazing on New Year's Eve, because if the Soviet Union obliterated the galaxies with nuclear weapons, the way his dad anticipated, he, for one, didn't want to miss it. He left a note for his family on a wrinkled, used napkin, but then accidentally wrapped up his bologna sandwich in it. A late-night snack to watch the world end by.

When his watch struck midnight with nary an explosion across the cosmos, Fry folded his empty napkin-note and his telescope across his chest and drifted off on the rooftop of the school, the stars singing him to sleep as they always did. Nothing could rouse him now, not the sirens, not the screams, nothing but Yancy's fist in his face well past dawn the next day. His elder brother laughed as he realized that their parents would find Phillip not only drowsy and confused the morning after the "message incident", but with a black eye. Or two. He punched the other one just for grins.

And only compounding the story was the bologna that he had consumed, which was at least two weeks old and fuzzy around the edges. His father watched, cross-armed, as he slumped over the toilet for the next day and a half, and hoped he'd learned the evils of underage drinking. He had instead learned the evils of overage meat.

He could explain it away, all of it, but the message. The blinking red button at 4:18 A.M. He had been sleeping like a rock, he said. His mother scowled as she played it for him.

* * *

"Temporal projector," Bender said, unceremoniously flinging the device in the vicinity of Fry's crotch. "Sends electronic signals across time and space. I was saving it to steal infectious bubble-gum pop hits from the future Top Ten charts, but I guess one layman use couldn't hurt. No, for real, you've got one shot."

Keeping one eye on the television broadcast of the break-in at the Planet Express, Bender insisted he had to call tonight, despite Fry's pleas for more time.

Fry dragged a forearm across his nose and alternately grinned and trembled. "Oh, God. What am I gonna say? I- I can't think- I wish I was less drunk. And less hungry." He ripped the last of the shrink wrap from his dinner and popped a few noodles in his mouth, crunching thoughtfully. "When I was a kid, my mom told me not to call home if I was drunk."

Somewhere in the distance, sirens howled. "It's been how many eons?" Bender snorted. "Listen, she's gonna wet herself just hearing your voice."

"Oh, no, I won't make her wait. I'm setting it to the night I disappeared. So they won't worry." Fry sniffled again. "Here goes nothing."

And he dialed.

* * *

" _I know you probably don't understand right now, but I love you a lot, and I wish I was home to say it in person. Also, the world doesn't end in Y2K, and Communists don't take over the world, fuel is actually clean and efficient, and mom, you make really good homemade noodles. And I started wearing socks, like you wanted."_

The rest of the message was lost in incoherent sobbing. Phillip blinked at his mother in confusion.

"I don't even know what some of those words mean. And I'm definitely not wearing socks." He yanked off his sneakers in protest.

He was still grounded for a month. No questions asked. Stop pouting or it'd be three.

He shuffled out, and his father frowned at her, equally bemused. "When _do_ you make homemade noodles?"

Don't take his side. It was a drunken delusion, of course. "And shut up. I can start."

(She did.)

* * *

Bender took the beeping machine away from Fry and hit _End Transmission._ He gave the organic moron a moment to compose himself before fiddling with the buttons. "A long range transmission like this is gonna be tricky. Still, shouldn't be off by more than a few hours or so. December thirty-first, you said?"

Fry nodded.

"1989?"

"Yeah. Wait- no. 'Ninety-nine." Bender's fingers suddenly froze, and Fry looked over with swollen eyes. "Did you get that?"

"Of course," Bender said.

(Bender lied.)

He suddenly threw the machine, along with the flames that were engulfing it, out the window. "Stupid long range message burned it out. After _one go_ ," he shouted. "Your stupid emotions _destroyed it!_ "

He knew that this was precisely what would happen from the start, of course, but that didn't stop him from wrapping the smoldering curtains around Fry's neck.

Fry broke free and wrapped the curtain around his shoulders, resting his head on the couch armrest. "I'm just glad they know," he murmured. "Wish I'd been sh-ober, though." She had told him, after all, but circumstances being what they were…

"Socks? Really?" Bender asked, just before his friend drifted off. "Since when?"

Fry scowled. "Shut up. I can start."

(He didn't.)

* * *

Sometimes she lies awake and stares at the glowing red zero on the answering machine, thinking that she'd take just about anything.

* * *

 **Your reviews sustain me. And I pour your tears on my cereal.**


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